Free Web NovelChapter 27: All In
[Man, I hate sprinters.]
The thought sat there while I stood on the rooftop and watched the infected solve the problem of getting up here, the only way they knew how, which was climbing over each other until height stopped being an obstacle.
The balcony I had climbed from no longer looked like a balcony.
It still existed somewhere underneath, but from where I stood, the thing had become a living mound of infected climbing over infected.
The ones at the bottom were getting crushed under the weight, the ones above using the crushed as stepping stones while the whole pile rose in steady increments that I could actually watch happen in real time.
The noise had gotten worse than the sight. Screaming from every direction, nails scraping concrete somewhere below, glass breaking, doors splintering, the entire block sounded like it had grown a single throat screeching at the top of its lungs.
I bent forward and put both hands on my knees.
My lungs burned with every breath. My ribs felt like someone had taken a sledgehammer to them repeatedly, which was about as close a comparison as I could make to getting shot in the chest while wearing a plate that actually worked. The plate had stopped the round completely. My body had not received that memo and kept sending pain through the bruise with every single heartbeat.
The graze along my waist wasn’t helping at all. Every movement pulled at it directly. Every breath reminded me it existed somewhere in my side.
My fingers were shaking when I looked down at them, and not from fear. Pulling myself onto this roof while three infected tried to drag me back down by the legs had taken more out of me than I wanted to admit out loud, even to myself.
A hand appeared over the edge of the roof behind me.
Then another. Then five more.
"Right..." I panted, straightening up despite the stab of pain that came with it. "Less dying. More problem solving."
I raised the DDM4 hanging from its sling against my chest, took aim, and immediately understood the suppressor was now a liability instead of an advantage.
The horde had grown loud enough that suppressed shots, loud as they were, would still vanish completely into the screams, and right now I needed the opposite of quiet.
I reached forward and twisted the suppressor free, the metal still warm from earlier use, and threw it away. After all, there were no slots available in the inventory, and I wasn’t about to pull the misc. chest out and waste the precious seconds.
The rifle felt shorter immediately, and meaner.
[System, buy me charged and ready C4s... gimme 20 of’em.]
-Ding!
{Done.}
That was more C4 than any sane person should ever own, but I’d rather have them and not need them than the alternative.
Two charges appeared in my hand a moment later, and I threw them onto the balcony pile without ceremony, then turned and booked it before they even landed.
Every stride hurt. The bruise beneath the plate pulsed with each footfall, and the waist wound burned worse the longer I kept moving, like someone had wrapped razor wire around it and was slowly tightening the loop.
The connected rooftops blurred past under my boots, concrete, satellite dishes, and water tanks, and at the end of the block came my way out.
It was a billboard.
An old T-shaped advertisement structure standing well above the rooftops, rust covering most of the framework. The platform attached to it was swaying slightly in the wind in a way that should have ended its career as a structure years ago.
Exactly the kind of thing that made you think this seems unsafe the moment you looked at it.
That platform below the ad stretched from the edge of this rooftop to the roof on the other side of the back alley.
A bridge high above with no stairs leading up to it. Technically, a bridge.
A terrible bridge, mind you, but a bridge nonetheless.
And just then, the first infected reached the spot where I’d been standing seconds earlier.
I pulled the grappling launcher, aimed at the upper framework near the platform’s railing, and fired.
-Thush-!-Tack-!
The hook bounced off the steel and vanished into the dark.
"Oh come on!"
I reeled it back, aimed again, and fired again, while the infected barreled at me.
-Thush-!-Bash -!
This time, the hook wrapped around one of the support beams. I stared at it for a second, then pulled hard, making sure it held.
I still didn’t trust that thing, but I had run out of time.
Wrapping both my hands around the grip, I sent a thought to the ascent, and I was away the moment that infected leaped at me.
[Damn it, this hurts like a bitch!]
My shoulders screamed under the strain of holding the grip that actively pulled me up.
The cable jerked partway up for some accursed reason when I gave the intent to slow down a bit, and my grip damn near slipped, my stomach dropping for a full second before I caught myself again with fingers that had already done enough today.
The gun kept dragging me upward slowly, my hands cramping around the grip, sweat running into my eyes, and halfway up, my left hand slipped a second time.
[Gonna fall...] the thought flapped up, and meant it completely, no maybe attached to the thought at all.
But through sheer jaw-clenched grit, I managed to hold on for dear life.
The platform came within reach, and I lunged for it with a hand outstretched and missed completely.
Swearing as I dangled from the grappling gun’s grip, I lunged again, and this time my fingers caught the railing.
I hauled myself upward with everything my arms had left, my chest screaming and the waist wound screeching its own bullshit the entire way, until I finally flopped over the railing and collapsed onto the platform.
I knelt there for several seconds, hands on the metal platform, panting, fighting down the urge to throw up.
While below me, the horde reached the roof I had just abandoned.
[Perfect timing...] I pulled the detonator, looked back, and pressed it.
-BOOM-!-BOOM-!
And the night went white.
The balcony pile simply stopped existing as a coherent shape, the blast punching outward through the mass of bodies and launching infected off the house entirely, some cartwheeled through open air, others bounced off the walls before hitting the ground. The entire pile collapsed as whatever had been supporting it was obliterated.
For one full second, the horde stopped behaving like a coordinated nightmare and started behaving like loose debris.
The shockwave rolled across the rooftops, but the screaming somehow got even louder underneath it.
"Beautiful..." I muttered, wiping sweat out of my eyes.
I pulled the Shorty-40 and found a second pile forming on my side of the block, smaller than the first but still large enough to be worth the round and a lot of credits, so I aimed and fired.
-Thunk-!-BOOM-! ƒгeeweɓn૦vel.com
The HEAP grenade detonated directly inside the mass, blasting out the infected in chunks of bloody meat, raining their blood onto the street below.
The point wasn’t the kills, it was attention. And nothing draws more attention the two C4 and a grenade blast.
I lowered the launcher and looked at the handywork for exactly as long as it took to reload, then crossed toward the opposite end of the platform.
The far side overlooked the same narrow back alley, with the rooftops on the other side of the back alley sitting below the platform I was standing on.
"Alright... you got this!" I pumped myself as I shot the claw at the platform railing this time and tugged hard several times, making sure the cable held against my full weight before I swung one leg over the railing, then the other, and immediately regretted both decisions the moment I jumped down, dangling from the grip once again.
Tightening my grip, I issued the descent command and started lowering myself, slow and careful, the motor whining steadily while my boots dangled in open air, while the bruise across my waist rippled in agony with every small rotation of my body.
Halfway down, my right hand cramped hard enough that I nearly lost the grip entirely.
"For just one time!" I gritted my teeth and tightened my grip through the cramp, with annus clenching grit until my boots finally touched the roof.
And the moment they did, I sat down immediately and stayed there three full seconds, legs trembling, lungs burning, pulse hammering against the bruise under the plate.
Then I remembered where I was sitting.
"Right..."
I pushed myself upright and moved to the edge of this new roof, where the horde was still mostly converging on the previous block, and I stepped into full view and raised the rifle and-
-THARD-!-THARD-!-THARD-!-THARD-!-THARD-!...
The unsuppressed DDM4 roared like a different weapon entirely compared to before, muzzle flashes lighting the dark, the sound rolling across rooftops in every direction, and the effect arrived almost instantly.
Thousands of heads turned toward me at once.
"Oh, yeah, gimme attention baby, papi’s hungry~"
I switched to a faster rhythm, and the bodies kept dropping, windows kept shattering, the actual hits mattered far less than the noise, and the infected absolutely loved the noise.
The first few reached the roof edge on the other side of the back alley, and just jumped without slowing down.
Jumped, straight across a 10-meter gap they had no chance of clearing, and the alley swallowed them one after another.
One missed by nearly two meters. Another slammed into the wall on the way down. Several collided with each other midair before falling.
A dozen followed, then two dozen, then fifty, and within seconds, an entire waterfall of screeching bodies poured off the roof and into the alley below, arms and legs thrashing on the way down.
The ones behind them watched this happen and apparently decided it was a wonderful idea.
More jumped, and fell, and the alley filled with broken bodies that kept moving despite the fall.
But that wasn’t enough to kill them.
Doors exploded open below me, windows shattered, and the horde started flooding through the houses below, running up stairs and crossing rooms, trying to reach my position from every direction the house’s interior would allow.
I emptied the rest of the drum, the bolt locking back, and my left hand reached for the mag well automatically, pulling the drum out, and switching it with a fresh drum right then and there from the Inventory before reseating a new one.
The whole thing took less than two seconds.
And with that, I turned and ran.
The rooftops blurred under my boots again, a satellite dish nearly taking my knee off before I vaulted it, pain flaring through my ribs as I jumped down on an open balcony before hopping its railing, and dropping to the street below, the impact narrowing my vision at the edges for a moment before it cleared again.
I stumbled, caught myself, and stopped completely for five or ten seconds, just long enough to catch my breath and handle the handful of stragglers on the street ahead.
-THARD-!-THARD-!-THARD-!
Three dropped in succession. I waited after that, breathing hard, every instinct telling me to keep moving and hide, and I stayed visible anyway because vanishing now would have killed the entire plan.
The first scream reached me seconds later, then fifty... then hundreds.
Doors burst open across houses at the same time as the windows exploded in shards of glass and snarls as bodies emerged from every gap between houses before me.
"Good..." I said between breaths. "I was getting tired of waiting anyway..."
Which was an insane thing to say about several thousand infected converging on my exact position, but accurate nonetheless.
I fired once more, not for kills, just to confirm the attention had landed properly, and then I turned and ran down the long straight road stretching ahead into darkness.
No corners or cover were ahead, just distance between me and the final stage of the plan, and several thousand reasons behind me not to slow down.
My lungs felt like I had inhaled sand within the first hundred meters.
Every breath scraped on the way in and came out sounding wrong on the way back.
I risked one glance behind me and immediately regretted it, because the road itself had disappeared completely beneath a solid mass of bodies running shoulder to shoulder, the front ranks sprinting while the ranks behind pushed them faster, trying to claw over them to ger ahead.
A doorway burst open to my left, and an infected launched itself into the street with no warning at all, and I twisted sideways at the last possible second, its fingers scraping across my plate carrier instead of finding my throat.
Pain detonated through my waist as I twisted, and my vision blurred for half a heartbeat before clearing.
Another came from the right. Then two more.
The front wasn’t the real danger anymore, since most of the infected in the area were behind me.
The real danger came from the sides, from doors, alleys I ran past, and the blind corners.
An arm shot out from an alley mouth, and I ducked, feeling fingers brush through my hair on the way past.
A second infected stumbled out of a shop doorway, and I cut left around it, nearly colliding with a third coming from the opposite direction, before elbowing it to the face, feeling fresh pain lance through my waist from the sudden movement.
My side felt wet again under the jacket, but I didn’t check it. Better not to know right now.
Not like I had the time to anyway.
Streetlights flickered overhead, a lot of them dead, only a few still casting weak pools of yellow light every few dozen meters, each pool showing the same picture: me running and the gap behind me shrinking.
One stray infected wandered directly into my path, and I shoulder checked it without slowing, its snapping teeth coming inches from my throat before it fell.
The impact slammed into my already bruised ribs hard enough to nearly buckle my legs.
I stumbled, somehow recovered, and kept moving while the horde swallowed the fallen infected behind me without breaking stride.
"Later, buddy..." I told my own body. "We’ll sleep for a week after this..."
My body disagreed completely, but kept moving anyway because the alternative was worse. ƒrēewebnovel.com
The road began sloping downward, gently at first, and ahead of me, the stage of the final showdown finally came into view.
The real slums.
A dense maze of tin roofs, patchwork brick walls, and homes built directly on top of older homes.
[Final stretch...] I thought, adjusting my grip on the rifle as I forced more air into lungs that had stopped wanting to cooperate.
The entrance arrived fast, a narrow gap between two leaning walls, just wide enough for a person to pass.
And I ran straight into it.
By all means, it was a death trap. But I had my cards, and I had no choice but to play them right because I was already all in.
